Monday, July 18, 2005

Aphex Twin

One of the best tracks, on one of his best albums (I can think of few higher accolades for anything...), Vordhosbn from disc 1 of Drukqs is a perfectly judged, perfectly balanced piece of music. (You can get it here, along with Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michael's Mount, another of the album's highlights) Vordhosbn's frenetic beat keeps the brain occupied, while the melody engages the emotions - so why fuck with it?

The track below is a vinyl rip of Vordhosbn, played at the wrong speed, that I found through one of Minikomi's posts on Dissensus. Slowed down, it works incredibly well, as it gives you time to appreciate each individual event, rather than having it fluttering away on the brink of imperceptibility - enabling you to realise just how complex RDJ's music is, and the minute detail that's included in every track. The pace allows you to nod your head and appreciate the rhythm without the appearance of someone suffering a rather serious seizure. The lack of clarity caused by drawing each attack out by a short amount of time adds a sort of fuzziness to the edges of everything, placing it closer to a Boards of Canada tune (who have a new album coming out in October 2005), and is especially effective with the melody, making it more breathy and perhaps a little more melancholic

You don't even need a record player to do this. Chronotron, available below, is a free plugin for Winamp, that lets you manipulate the pitch and tempo of mp3 files while you listen to them, allowing you to recreate the effect of the speed change used in this track

Drukqs has been manipulated in other ways by its listeners. Go here for an mp3 of both Drukqs discs played simultaneously (you'll be suprised how well it works...)

End-user/consumer appropriation of music is an interesting phenomenon that will inevitably become more common as more and more people start to gain an understanding of music production through the more widespread use of production tools and their increasingly easy-to-use interfaces. I wonder if the industry will respond to it at all - I'd love to see finished albums packaged along with the building blocks of each track - allowing consumers to remix the tracks at their own will, and create their own versions of album to suit their tastes. This sort of interactivity, in which if you don't like a certain part of a track, you can change it, would add a new vitality to the music scene

seeing as how you're an aphex fan - check this one out, you may dig - 22-pc. avant classical/new music ensemble covering the lead track off the RDJ album? it's off an entire album of aphex twin covers they've just done - and immaculately well, i might add :)

I got 'Four' from Swen's Blog a couple of weeks back and semi-liked what I heard. The drum sounds remain fairly faithful to RDJ, but I find the other sounds too long - they don't recreate his small, choppy sounds - lacks his precision. nice idea though